THE DISTURBANCES OF CHILDREN IN URBAN AREAS.

One persistent explanation of the distribution of delinquency rates in urban areas relates concentrations of offenders to stress situations. Its advocates, usually coming from the fields of psychology or social work, reason that children in high delinquency rate areas are more likely to be disturbed, unhappy youngsters, especially in their experiences at home, than are those in low rate areas, and these different tension levels in urban areas are of major importance for explaining the difference in delinquency rates among those areas. If one uses scores from validated tests as measures of children's "emotional stability" and of their satisfaction with family life, and if one relates these scores to the delinquency rates of the census tracts in which the children live, the problem becomes one of determining whether variations in the test scores of emotional disturbance seem useful in accounting for the differences in delinquency rates. This problem was tested out in selected schools in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.